I’m not saying that this will happen. I’m absolutely conducting a thought experiment here… just speculating. We all know it won’t be a serious challenger to WoW, but there is a great deal of room under the high bar that Blizzard has set for a game to be successful. But just imagine for a moment that Age of Conan does do really well… on the PC, with pretty high minimum systems specs and optimum specs that are even more rarified. Imagine that there is lots of positive buzz over the game.

Now imagine that in Q3 or Q4 Age of Conan comes out on the X-Box 360. It’d be the first Triple-A title to release on a console – for which the high spec barrier becomes irrelevant – and possibly the first MMO to be released that allows players from both platforms to play together. In every comparison between AoC and the still-upcoming WAR, people are assuming that WAR will come out on top. But WAR isn’t scheduled for a console release, and almost nobody seems to be thinking about that right now.

From where I’m sitting, if AoC launches solid and successful and acquits itself well over the next six months or so (which, I have to add, is by no means a certainty,) it may very well be the other way around. For that matter, if all this happens, might even WoW not start looking a lot more vulnerable?

Idle speculation, of course. But then again… “Thither came Conan, a reaver, a slayer, to tread on the jeweled thrones of the Earth beneath his sandaled feet.”